UK

Interest in ketamine therapy for treating depression is exploding in the UK (Ryan & Loo, 2017), and there is a push to make this treatment available free of charge as part of their public health system.

Thousands of people with severe depression could obtain urgent relief if ketamine therapy were made more widely available, UK medical experts say. (1)

In 2014, spurred on by research taking place in the US, NHS consultant psychiatrist Rupert McShane headed up the first UK study(Diamond et al., 2014) on the drug as a treatment for depression.

“The results of the study were the sort of thing that makes it all worthwhile—it reminded me a bit of the film Awakenings . . . We had one patient who was very sick, had ketamine, and got sufficiently well that they were able to write a really complicated, competitive grant application. They then won that grant,” says McShane.